


Your Face Sketched On It Twice

by nagi_schwarz



Series: Traveling Man [35]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Angst, M/M, Temporary Amnesia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-03
Updated: 2018-03-03
Packaged: 2019-03-26 15:15:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13860402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagi_schwarz/pseuds/nagi_schwarz
Summary: McKay wakes in a field with no memory of how he got there or how to get home. As his memories unfold, he makes his way back, but he's not sure the place he gets to is home.





	Your Face Sketched On It Twice

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SherlockianSyndromes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SherlockianSyndromes/gifts).



> This isn't a McShep fic, not at all.

He didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know who he was. He came to himself lying on his back in an open field. He sat up, looked around. Tall green grass swayed around him in a gentle breeze. When he stood - slowly, cautiously, a curious ache in his limbs - the grass reached his knees. The sky overhead was clear, blue, cloudless, and the sunlight was warm on his skin.

Where was he?

Somewhere nice.

Who was he?

Someone who was pretty much okay. He was wearing black boots, gray pants, a gray-and-blue windbreaker, a matching blue shirt underneath.

What was going on?

He’d taken a nap, maybe. There was a black vest full of pockets on the ground beside a little handheld PDA-looking thing and a pistol in a holster. A thigh holster. His, most likely. He knelt and poked through the vest pockets. A small flashlight. A couple of power bars - chocolate; he knew that was his favorite. An epi pen - he had an allergy; to what? A pen and a notebook full of mathematical equations. Physics. Was he a mathematician or a physicist? No reason he couldn’t be both.

Who was he? 

There was no name in the notebook.

Folded in the back of the notebook was a coaster with some cartoon-like beer logo. He unfolded it, turned it over, and stared. Someone had drawn a map of Canada in strong, solid lines, with a little compass rose that looked like a star and only north notated where Toronto was. Sketched over the map in fainter, almost absent lines were two portraits of the same person - a boy, maybe eighteen years old. In one picture his eyes were closed, like he was sleeping. In the other he was smiling. He had pretty features but a strong angular jaw and a curiously crooked mouth.

Written beneath the smiling portrait were the words  _ My merry Merry. _

What did that even mean?

And then he remembered.

*

He’d left his textbooks on his towel on the sand and headed back up to his car to find some highlighters, and when he got back, they were gone. As was his towel.

Panic tightened like a vise around his lungs as he stormed across the sand in search of his possessions - towel, textbooks, sunblock, citrus-free snacks. He was on scholarship, couldn’t afford to buy all new textbooks. He was a genius but he didn’t have an eidetic memory, needed to study to learn.

And then, a good fifteen meters up the sand, he found his supplies just as he’d left them. 

Had he just forgotten where he’d been sitting to study? All his professors nagged him about how studying was more effective in natural light, how he should go out and get more sun. Like he needed skin cancer on top of everything else - his parents divorcing over their disagreement about sending him to university in America at sixteen (mother against it, father all for it, younger sister caught in the crossfire because she was almost as brilliant as him and destined for an equally precipitous departure from secondary school in the next couple of years), being broke and alone in a country that was utterly foreign despite the language it more or less shared with home. Canada was markedly more civilized.

His conviction in his country’s superiority solidified when he finally found his supplies -  with a note on top of them.

In pretty cursive, someone had written:

_ Dear Meredith McKay, _

_ I apologize for moving your belongings. The tide is coming in and I didn’t want them to get wet. Happy studying! _

There was no signature.

He snatched up the note, crumpled it in one fist, and then he realized - the tide  _ was _ higher than it had been when he’d gone up to look for highlighters in the car. How long had he been searching?

And who the hell else was on this deserted stretch of beach so early in the morning? He’d come to the beach this early so as to be left in peace and quiet.

He squinted at the horizon, and then he saw, out on the waves, a lone figure. A surfer.

Some dim-witted pot-smoking surfer had dared touch his things?

Fury welled in his chest.

He plopped down on his towel, wrenched open his quantum mechanics book, uncapped a highlighter with a vicious chomp of his teeth, and settled in to wait till the wave rat emerged from the water so he could give the punk a piece of his mind.

Only by the time the surfer finally emerged from the water, he was pretty absorbed in his textbook, so when someone finally came trotting up the sand, sleek in a dark wetsuit, surfboard tucked under one arm, most of his righteous fury had faded to mere irritation.

“Hey,” a boy said.

He looked up.

The surfer boy looked about the same age as him, sixteen. He was slender and lean, with bright blue eyes, sleek dark hair, and dimples when he smiled.

“Is Meredith upset that I moved her stuff? Only the tide was coming in -”

“I’m Meredith,” he snapped.

The boy blinked. “Oh. I - sorry. I just thought -”

“Everyone does.” He took a breath. “Thank you for protecting my textbooks. They’re very expensive and I need all of them.”

“You’re welcome. I’m Evan, by the way.” Again with that dimpled smile.

He was too damn cute for Meredith’s own good.

“Then thank you, Evan. Try not to drip on the books you rescued.”

Evan took a large step back. “Sorry. It was nice to meet you, Merry - uh, Meredith. Sorry.”

_ “Merry?” _

“Sorry - reflex. I’m rereading  _ Lord of the Rings. _ There’s this one hobbit named Merry. Um, a hobbit is -”

“Yes, I’m aware of the story and its characters.”

“I’m sorry I messed up your name.”

“You apologize too much, and coming from a Canadian that’s pretty rich.”

“Oh. You’re Canadian? That’s cool. I was born and raised here.” Evan peered at Meredith’s textbooks. “They teach some complicated science at Canadian schools.”

“I’m not in high school. I’m a freshman at CalTech.”

Evan blinked. His blue eyes were even bluer with his wet-spiky lashes. “You don’t look much older than me.”

“I’m sixteen.”

“So you’re a genius? Like Einstein.”

“Yes.”

A slow grin spread across Evan’s face. “That’s cool.”

Meredith blinked. No one had ever said that before, at least no one else even near his own age, not back in his old secondary school, not in the dorms, not in his classes now.

“Well, I’d better leave you to saving the world with your genius. I have to get home and get ready for school. It was nice to meet you, Merry McKay.” Evan grinned, waved, and trotted up the beach.

Meredith watched him go, entranced by his fantastic ass, and forgot to correct the misuse of his name.

Merry he would be, for that boy.

As if he’d ever see that boy again.

*

He poked through his notebook some - he was reasonably assured it was his, because the vest fit when he shrugged it on, as did the thigh holster, but that took a bit more wrangling. There were no more details about who he was (some kind of mathematician-physicist-soldier, apparently) and why he’d been taking a nap in a field in the middle of nowhere. He was McKay, that much he was sure of. No one called him Meredith anymore - he was sure of that too. He wasn’t sixteen anymore.

No one save Evan had ever been allowed to call him Merry. He knew that better than he knew his own name.

The flash of memory hit him like a brick, pain lancing through his skull.

Evan was there - not pretty Evan from the beach, sixteen and slender and sweet. Evan who was older like McKay, broader in the shoulders, also wearing a uniform just like McKay’s, gray pants and jacket and black vest with pockets, only he was carrying an assault rifle, and he looked angry and afraid and shocked as -

As McKay shoved him onto a  _ spaceship _ and lied to him in a low, angry voice.

_ I’m right behind you. _

Damn. McKay was some kind of space soldier. But he was Canadian, and Evan was American. How could they both be space soldiers? McKay would never have given up his Canadian citizenship for anything.

Did that mean Evan had given up his American citizenship?

Why would he have?

*

Meredith did see Evan again. Again and again and again, because Evan went surfing every morning before school. Evan’s habit of rising early and doing something consistently spoke to a discipline Meredith had never expected in a surfer, let alone an ordinary high school student, and an American one at that. But every day Evan showed up, and every day he rode the waves for at least half an hour, and then he’d go home to get ready for school. 

Either he lived near the beach - which spoke to his family’s wealth - or he was willing to walk a fair distance every morning to indulge in his mindless hobby.

He was pretty good, though. Meredith was no expert at surfing, but Evan looked confident out on the waves, could do turns and, if the waves were big enough, little jumps and flips.

On warm days, Evan just wore a pair of brightly-patterned board shorts, which meant when he came by to say hello after - he always came by to say hello after - Meredith could admire his bare chest and abs. As the season wore on, summer fading into autumn, Evan wore a wetsuit more and more, which was kind of a shame, but all that paddling and surfing kept him pretty lean.

Evan said hello to Meredith every day, but he didn’t often stop for long, just smiled and waved and then headed for home, barefoot like a heathen.

As autumn drew on, however, the waves were smaller and smaller, the tides changing, and sometimes Meredith would arrive at the beach to study and Evan’s board would be planted upright in the sand and Evan would be out in the waves just swimming. Evan’s board was beautiful, had an intricate henna tattoo-looking design overlaid on a marbled blue-yellow-green background, something that was part flower, part sun.

After Evan finished swimming, he came trotting up the beach, shivering, and picked up a towel that Meredith hadn’t seen hidden behind his surfboard.

“No surfing?” Meredith asked without looking up from his textbook lest he be caught staring (and get punched in the face).

“Waves weren’t right. Swimming is good, though. Wakes me up, gets the blood flowing.” Evan unzipped the top half of his wetsuit to his waist, and Meredith could see the cut of his hips, that he wasn’t wearing anything beneath his wetsuit.

Blood was flowing, all right. Meredith gritted his teeth and shifted his textbook on his lap. Damn teenage hormones. Understanding the process of puberty on a scientific level was one thing; living it was hell.

And then Evan, damn him, spread out his towel and plopped down beside Meredith, rested his elbows on his knees.

“So, what are you studying? I mean, besides physics and math.”

“The secrets to the keys of the universe,” Meredith said loftily, still not looking up from his textbook, though he did sneak a glance at Evan sidelong, Evan whose golden skin was gleaming, Evan who was smiling at him.

“Yeah? What do you think is out there?”

Meredith lifted his head sharply. “Why would anything be out there?”

Evan shrugged. “It makes sense. We can’t be the best there is.”

“Why not?”

“Well, we’re sort of backwards, aren’t we? If entropy always increases, if energy always converts to its lowest form, how did life evolve into bigger and more complicated things? Shouldn’t we have started bigger and broken down into smaller and smaller pieces and parts, simpler things?”

Meredith frowned. “It’s more complicated than that.”

“Either we’re the simpler, smaller pieces of something bigger and better, or something bigger and better helped us escape the downward spiral of entropy.”

Meredith stared at him. “I thought surfers smoked weed.”

“Some do. I don’t like how it makes me feel slow, though. I have plans. I want to see the stars someday.” Evan tipped his head back, gazed up at the sky.

The line of his throat looked incredibly inviting. Meredith wanted to lean in, find out how his skin tasted.

He forced that treacherous thought aside and shook his head. “You’re a dreamer, aren’t you? You probably believe in karma and souls, too.”

“Don’t you believe in souls?”

“No. Nothing lasts forever.”

“Except matter and energy, which can be neither created nor destroyed - they only change forms.” Evan pushed himself to his feet.

Meredith spluttered. “While that may be true,” he began, but Evan just laughed and waved and said,

“See you tomorrow.”

And he did. As autumn wore on, the waves weren’t good for surfing, but Evan kept swimming, and after his swim he’d sit beside Meredith and talk to him a bit, and he wasn’t nearly as stupid as Meredith had initially thought he’d be. He was nowhere near Meredith’s level - but then hardly anyone was; that was part of the definition of a genius - but he was easy to talk to.

And he listened, when Meredith talked about the things he was learning, about the things he theorized about the universe.

One day, after Meredith had expounded at length about the possibilities of zero-point energy, Evan said,

“Can I kiss you?”

Meredith spluttered. “What?”

“Don’t get all offended - I’m not making an attempt on your virtue. Just asking. If you say no, we can still be friends.” Evan’s tone was light, calm, but his shoulders were tense.

“I’m not offended,” Meredith said quickly, because no one had ever asked him that before. “Just - pretty boys like you don’t usually want to with boys like - like me.”

Evan reached out, curved his palm along the line of Meredith’s jaw. “Merry,” he said, very solemnly, “you’re beautiful.”

Meredith blinked. “You’re just saying that because you want to kiss me.”

“You are beautiful, and I do want to kiss you, but both of those things will still be true even if you don’t want me to kiss you.”

Meredith stared at him, searching for any hint that this was a prank, but Evan just smiled at him.

Meredith grabbed his shoulder and yanked him in. For a first kiss it was clumsy and awkward, but it was perfect, because Evan’s skin was smooth and warm, and he parted his lips so Meredith could lick into his mouth, and when Meredith ran his hands down Evan’s bare chest Evan moaned and arched into his touch, and then they had to break apart to breathe.

“Um, wow.” Evan gazed into Meredith’s eyes, grinning, delighted.

“Ditto,” Meredith said faintly, breathless.

“Listen,” Evan said, “I have to get to school, but - there’s always tomorrow. And tomorrow. And tomorrow.”

Meredith winced, because he knew Shakespeare, and that line was from a speech about death and endings. “Look, Evan, I want you, but I can’t - the others in the dorms, at school -”

“I understand,” Evan said, and maybe he did, still in high school as he was, and an American one at that. He leaned in and kissed Meredith again, long and deep and slow. “You can have me any way you want.”

Then he was on his feet and heading up the sand and to home, wherever that was, and Meredith could only watch him go and wish he was a better person, was capable of more than just wanting someone as beautiful as Evan.

*

McKay was under no illusion that Evan had up and abandoned his country to joined the armed forces with him, but he did know that he was a soldier, that Evan was also a soldier, and McKay had stayed wherever he was to make sure Evan and the other soldiers made it home safe.

Did that mean he was on an alien planet?

Everything looked so ordinary - the trees, the grass, the sky, the -

No, not the sky.

Because there were two suns in the sky.

He was on an alien planet.

There had been a spaceship. Evan had gotten onto that spaceship. McKay had promised to be right behind him, but that was a lie. Why had he stayed behind? To protect Evan from something, but it must not have been that perilous, because McKay was uninjured, had all his gear.

Except - wait. Evan had had an assault rifle. Where was McKay’s? He went prowling through the grass where he’d first woken up, but there was no sign of it.

He closed his eyes, recalled the memory of Evan getting onto the spaceship once more.

Evan had some kind of earpiece, which meant - radio.

McKay patted himself down, checked his pockets.

No radio, no earpiece.

But he had that little handheld PDA thing. He tugged it out of its pocket and stared at it, and the screen lit up.

He’d felt it buzz in his head. It was a mind-controlled device. 

All it showed on the screen was a single blue-green blip. A life sign. How did he know that? Irrelevant. He knew it, and it was right. That single life sign was him. There was no one else around him, no one in a one-hundred meter radius.

Whatever it was Evan and the spaceship had needed protecting from, McKay had done it, because though he was missing his radio and his assault rifle, he was fine. So now he had to get back to the spaceship or wherever it was going, home base or headquarters or whatever it was called. Because Evan would be there, and even if he and Evan weren’t in love - he was pretty sure they weren’t - he knew Evan would be kind to him.

“Okay,” he said aloud to himself. “If I were a spaceship, where would I be hiding?”

As if the PDA had read his mind - and maybe it had - it gave a little blip, and he turned, following the sound till it got stronger. Good. He had the start of a plan.

*

Evan wasn’t the only person Meredith was with, because he was the youngest in the dorms and in all his classes, and the other boys thought it was funny to get him drunk and take him to parties and tell pretty freshman girls that he was a virgin and they should educate him. He was a genius, but not in the ways of  _ love. _ Meredith didn’t imagine for one second that those drunken fumblings were love, but they were educational, and he discovered he could have fun with girls just as well as boys, only if he wanted to keep his head about him, he didn’t dare have fun with boys on campus where any of his dorm mates or classmates might find out.

Evan was still in high school, but he fit better with Meredith than anyone else. Mornings at the beach were theirs, Meredith studying and Evan in or on the water, the two of them setting their singular pursuits aside afterward and coming together, hands and mouths and skin on skin. As autumn turned toward winter, when it was too cold to be at the beach that early, Evan waited in the pre-dawn cold to show Meredith where he lived, a house just a couple hundred yards up from the beach.

Meredith could pull his old car in close, headlights off so as not to wake anyone else in the house (Evan’s mother, grandmother, and sister all lived there too), and climb into Evan’s window - luckily Evan’s room was on the first floor - and the whole world was theirs.

Evan wanted to be an astronaut, so he was studying hard at school to get a scholarship to the Air Force Academy so he could go to space one day, see the stars. He was smart for a surfer, Meredith knew that, but he hadn’t appreciated quite how smart. Evan wasn’t just a surfer - he was a painter, too. His desk looked like it belonged to two people, one a scientist, all textbooks and graph paper and an expensive calculator Evan had worked hard to save up for; the other an artist, all sketchbooks and paintboxes and brushes and pens and pencils and charcoal.

Evan’s bed was barely big enough for the two of them.

However educational those parties with co-eds might have been, Meredith learned worlds and universes with Evan beneath his soft cotton sheets.

Evan was a ridiculously perky morning person. Meredith usually dozed after they had sex. Sometimes Evan cuddled up with him, but more often than not he was at his desk, drawing or sketching or painting.

Meredith kept his eyes mostly closed, peering at Evan from beneath his lashes, feigning sleep while Evan, unabashedly nude, sat at his desk and drew. He always drew Meredith, had seemingly an entire sketchbook full of pictures of Meredith mostly naked and half-awake. Meredith could see the marks he’d left on Evan’s skin, kiss-bruises and finger-bruises, nibbles and scratches and the occasional hint of beard burn even though neither of them shaved all that often.

Meredith could catalogue every mark, remembered making it. He was all over Evan’s body. Evan was  _ his. _ Except Evan wasn’t. They weren’t dating, weren’t boyfriends. They were - what were they? 

He feigned stirring, yawning and stretching.

Evan glanced up from his sketchbook, smiled, flipped to a new page, kept on drawing.

Meredith cleared his throat. “I know there’s no form and no labels to put on this thing we keep and dip into when we need, and I don’t have the right to ask where you go at night, but - but it’s like waves crashing over my head, when I think of someone else here, with you, in this bed.”

Evan flicked another glance at him. “That rhymed.”

Meredith pushed himself up into a sitting position. “Evan -”

“There’s no one else,” Evan said. “For me. I know there is for you, but you’re all I want.”

Guilt flooded Meredith. “I just - the other guys in the dorms -”

Evan kept on drawing. “You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”

“Are you mad? Are you - are you  _ hurt?” _

“Yes,” Evan said, and Meredith recognized the tense set of his shoulders, like right before the first time they’d kissed. Then he set down his charcoal and lifted his head. “But you’re worth it.”

That was definitely something no one had ever said to Meredith anymore.

He flung the covers aside and was across the room in an instant, cradling Evan’s face in his hands and kissing him desperately.

The next time his dorm mates took him to a party and tried to get him drunk, he refused the drinks and the pretty co-ed girls they pushed at him, reminded them all that he was sixteen, and he went to find Evan.

*

McKay was a genius, and the overarching answer to his problem was very, very simple: he needed to find Evan. Evan loved him, and McKay had to get back to him. So he unholstered his pistol, and he held it and his PDA out in front of him, the way cops did with guns and flashlights on TV, and he followed the weak signal across the tall swaying grass to a low green mound.

No, not a green mound.

One of those spaceships, half-buried in the dirt on impact.

McKay’s heart skipped a beat. He circled the spaceship, PDA extended, but there was still only one life sign - him - and a very weak signal from the ship.

No. The ship had crashed. Everything had gone wrong. Evan hadn’t escaped. Evan was dead, the other space soldiers were dead.

McKay tore through his pockets for an inhaler or something, because there was a vise around his lungs and his head was starting to swim and he hadn’t been taking a nap, he’d been knocked out, left for dead - most likely by the evil aliens who’d shot down Evan’s spaceship.

How was he supposed to get inside? Were the doors broken? Did he dare look inside, chance upon Evan’s lifeless and possibly mangled body?

He pocketed the PDA and moved closer, reached out, felt along the doors, tried to figure out how they opened. But there were no buttons. And then he remembered - the PDA was mind-controlled. Maybe the doors were, too?

McKay squeezed his eyes shut and thought hard.  _ Open. _

Nothing happened.

He tried again.  _ Open sesame. _

Still no response.

McKay circled the mound again. Where was the front viewport? Maybe he could break the glass and get in. The spaceship was burrowed deep in the ground, and there was no way he could dig his way in. On the other hand, it looked like the roots of the grass were growing into the cracks in the ship’s hull-fuselage-outer shell parts.

And then he realized.

Grass growing into the ship. It had crashed a long time ago. No way had it crashed recently, not if he could remember Evan getting on it - getting on it when?

Years ago? Was he like that guy from that one movie, who only remembered things for ten minutes at a time and needed tattoos and polaroids to function? Was that why he had no assault rifle and no radio, because over time they’d broken? Did he do this every day, stumble through his own memories of Evan and try fruitlessly to get back to him?

McKay looked down at himself. No. His uniform looked relatively new and clean. No tears or fraying or patches and repairs. Evan and the other space soldiers had gotten away. McKay had helped them escape. Now it was up to him to find his own way back to base.

He checked his PDA again. There was still a weak signal emitting from the ship. It had power, likely not enough to fly - he didn’t know how to fly anyway, but Evan probably did, had probably become an astronaut like he dreamed and then made contact with aliens and now McKay was a space soldier with him; a mathematician-physicist would be very useful in space. The spaceship might have some kind of radio system he could use. There was just the faintest signal coming from the ship. Some kind of power.

Even if the radio system in the ship was broken, maybe he’d be able to make some kind of radio out of parts of the ship.

He had to get in.

He could take advantage of the damage already done by time and nature. There were weak points in the outer shell. He’d break through there. First things first: tools.

_ Evan, I’m not going to break my promise. I’m coming home. _

*

“Berkeley,” Meredith explained. He and Evan were sitting side-by-side on the sand, watching the sun go down over the ocean.

“That’s impressive,” Evan said softly.

Meredith’s graduating from college with a double major in physics and engineering and minors in computer programming and mathematics was more than impressive, but beneath his soft artistry and zen surfing and dreamy love of the stars, Evan was sarcastic and the master of understatement.

Evan was graduating from high school in a week.

“I applied to Berkeley,” Evan said. “If I do aeronautical engineering it’d look good for NASA.”

“Oh?” Meredith’s heart pounded.

“I got in.”

“Of course you did.”

Because Evan worked hard on top of being smart. He could do anything he wanted.

“Do you want me to go with you?” Evan finally looked at Meredith.

He hesitated. Jeannie was coming down to Berkeley for her undergrad. Mom was done with her (and him), Dad was dead, and Jeannie was all he had left. It was Dad’s dying wish, that Meredith and Jeannie work together, change the world. Jeannie didn’t know about Meredith and boys.

That hesitation was his undoing.

Evan said, “Are you sure?”

“I just - that level of commitment - we’re only eighteen -”

“Do you want to think about it?”

Meredith frowned, unhappy, because Evan was obviously hurt.

“Think about it,” Evan said, pushing himself to his feet. “And meet me at the usual spot, tomorrow night, at eight. Or not. I suppose if you don’t, I’ll know your decision.” 

He leaned down, pressed a kiss to Meredith’s hair, like a farewell, like a benediction, and then walked away.

All night and all the next day, Meredith fretted, but Jeannie called him a dozen times. She was packing up, she was gathering her things. What should she bring, what should she leave? What was the weather like? What did other girls her age wear?

At a quarter to eight, Meredith was still at the dorms, fretting, pacing up and down, thinking.

Evan wanted to be an astronaut, to see the stars. His best chance at that wasn’t engineering, it was the Air Force. If Evan joined the Air Force, he couldn’t be with Meredith, not openly. Not that they’d been open before, but if anyone found out about them there would be more serious consequences; it could cost Evan his future and Meredith the only family he had left.

At eight o’clock he was out the door and dashing to his car.

He arrived at their usual place, the little snack shack at the top of the beach that sold regular drinks for kids and alcohol for adults. He and Evan always sat at the end of the bar together and shared some kind of virgin fruity drink with a couple of little umbrellas in it.

When he dashed up to the shack, it was deserted save for the woman behind the bar.

Meredith pulled up short, dismayed.

“You looking for Evan?” she asked.

He turned to her, startled that she even knew Evan’s name; they’d been frequenting this place for two years and he still didn’t know hers.

He nodded. “Was he here?”

The woman pushed a coaster across the bar. “He left this for you.”

The design on the front of the coaster was murky in the blue glow from the little TV in the corner that was forever tuned to the weather channel so surfers could always know the surf conditions. Meredith turned it over.

On it Evan had drawn a map of Canada, with Meredith’s hometown marked by a north star. He must have waited a while, because he’d doodled two portraits of Meredith, one of him asleep, one of him awake and smiling.

_ My merry Merry, _ he’d written beneath the portraits. 

The woman leaned across the bar and said, “If you really care about him, go to him, stay with him. But - he’s hurt. Be prepared to bleed.”

Meredith drew back, startled and offended by this unsolicited advice into his personal relationships, and then he really looked at the woman and saw - she had Evan’s mouth. She was related to him. His mother? 

“You know the way to the house,” the woman said, and straightened up, turned away.

Meredith nodded, tucked the coaster into his pocket, and ducked away from the snack shack.

But he didn’t head toward Evan’s house. He headed back to his car and back to the dorms to finish packing up his belongings so he could move into the apartment he’d leased for himself and Jeannie closer to Berkeley.

This was best for both of them.

*

McKay felt strange, hollow, disembodied as he smashed his way into the spaceship, then began tearing it up in search of parts. As he worked, he was still gutted from the memory of walking away from Evan like that. What the hell had he been thinking, throwing that kind of commitment away? Because he was pretty sure he wasn’t working with his sister either. Unless he was? Maybe they’d all made up and joined the space soldier program together? 

Even if he didn’t consciously know how the spaceship worked, some part of him did. He took off his vest, shrugged off his jacket, tied knots in the ends of the sleeves, zipped it back up, and then used it to hold the control crystals and conduit he pulled out. He harvested crystals from the main power and life support systems and also from the main navigational control panel, because he knew the communication systems were located there.

Once he had everything he thought he could carry, he strapped it to his vest so he had his hands free for his pistol and PDA, and he set off again. He was hungry, tired, and thirsty, and the PDA was no longer reading residual power from the spaceship, so he was pretty sure he’d obtained the power core.

He paused outside the spaceship, and the double-shadows were at odds with each other, one long, one short as one of the suns dipped toward the horizon for the first sunset. Which way should he go? He fiddled with the PDA, looking for more screen sensor options, for more power sources, some other sign of technology. He didn’t know his way around, and if he just went wandering he’d be in trouble, since he had no water.

What was the best way to find water? Get on high ground and look?

The planet was quiet - too quiet, he realized. No sounds of bugs or animals. Surely those had to exist in some form for the plants to survive, right? Ecosystems. Not that botany or entomology were his fields of expertise.

No, the best thing for him to do would be to stay in the crashed spaceship where it was safe, where he had shelter, where -

The screen switched, and suddenly he had - a map.

And he knew where to get water. Within a hundred yards. 

First order of business was water. Second order of business was building a radio.

He’d go get some water, drink his fill, then bunk down in the spaceship and build himself a crystal radio, then switch it on and scan frequencies and hope to hear someone, hope someone heard him.

It was a really awesome plan. He had goals.

The hike down to the stream wasn’t so bad, but the crystals and components were heavy. He unslung them before he knelt to drink, because he didn’t want to fall in and drown. He was grateful he hadn’t heard any animals on the planet, because then he didn’t have to think about other animals drinking out of this same stream - or worse.

He drank till he almost felt sick, then heaved himself to his feet, gathered up his gear, and staggered back up to the spaceship. He hunkered down in the shade of it next to the hole he’d bashed in the side of it and set to work. Building a radio was elementary,  _ more _ basic than elementary, because in grade six he’d built a nuclear device that was operational but for the fact that he lacked any usable fissile material. The second sun was high in the sky, but the first sun had gone down long ago, and now the shadows looked more normal.

Harder than building the crystal radio receiver was building the transmitter so he could broadcast messages, not just receive them, but it was easy to figure out, and then he fiddled with it so it would receive a broad incoming range of signals and broadcast on the same range.

The second sun was lower in the sky by the time the radio transmitter was done. He kept an eye on his PDA, lest any new life signs suddenly appear on it, but just as he’d been when he’d woken up, just as he’d been all day, he was alone.

Once the transmitter was done, he had to compose a message, something brief but informative. He was a space soldier, and he had to have some kind of base or HQ or something, but he couldn’t remember what that was called or what his rank was, so - so he settled for something that would sound definitely Earth-based, in case other aliens used similar communication technology.

Would he be broadcasting his signal to hostile aliens who wanted to hurt him?

Well, he’d have to take his chances. He needed to find Evan and get home.

Evan  _ was _ home.

So he fired up the radio, cleared his throat, and said, “Base, this is McKay. Please respond, over.”

There was no response.

That was fine. He’d just have to keep repeating his message.

So he did, over and over again.

He went down to the stream for more water before it got dark, and he was so very hungry, but he had to ration his power bars in case he was there for a really long time.

As the second sun slid lower and lower to the horizon, he kept on repeating his message, over and over again, with a substantial pause in between each iteration to allow someone to reply.

“Base, this is McKay. Please respond, over.”

A man who was not Evan said, “Rodney! There you are! Get back to the gate.”

And he remembered. “Be right there, John.”

He got to his feet, gathered up his gear, and tuned the PDA - LSD, life signs detector - to the gate, and he started for it.

He was Dr. Rodney McKay, the Chief Science Officer of the Atlantis Expedition. Scientist, yes. Soldier, no. Evan was Major Lorne, the base second-in-command after Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard, who was Rodney’s team leader. It had been sixteen years, and they’d both changed, but - did Evan recognize him? Remember him? Think about him?

He made it back to the gate before the second sun was all the way down, and he dialed Atlantis, transmitted his IDC, stepped through.

Into a gate room where John and Teyla and Ronon were gathered, waiting for him, along with Elizabeth. 

“So nice of you to finally answer the radio and join us,” John said, and though his tone was chiding there was worry in his eyes.

“Lost my radio,” Rodney said. “Had to make a new one.”

“To the infirmary with you,” Elizabeth said, and Rodney let John lead him to the transporter.

Rodney insisted a thousand times that he was fine while Dr. Beckett shone a penlight in his eyes, took his vital signs, and it took a thousand and one insistences before John left. Once he was gone, Rodney confessed, in soft tones, that his memory had gone a bit hazy, that he’d been unconscious for some time after the puddle jumper with AR-3 departed, that he’d woken disoriented, but his memories had come back over time.

Beckett immediately scanned him with the Ancient medical scanner.

“Aye, you’ve been concussed,” he said. “Some of the memory loss can also be from the trauma. You’re off duty till the damage is resolved. I’ll need to tell Elizabeth and Sheppard -”

“Give me a couple days. To see if everything comes back.”

“Rodney -”

“Hey, we’re talking about my right to medical privacy, here.”

“Fine. Fifty-six hours, no more. After that I’m telling them, no matter what you do or don’t remember.”

“Yes, okay, you Fascist Leprechaun.”

“Leprechauns are Irish.”

“I know.” Rodney let Beckett finish his exam, submitted to being kept for a few hours for observation, and settled back on his cot to finally, finally rest.

Once Beckett went to see to another patient, Rodney beckoned to one of the Marines who stood around as infirmary security. The young man looked dubious as to why Rodney would want his attention, but he approached anyway.

Rodney found a piece of paper, folded it up, and tucked the old coaster into it.

“Take this to Major Lorne,” he said. “ASAP.”

The Marine looked at the folded piece of paper, then up at Rodney, puzzled, but he nodded and ducked out of the infirmary.

Rodney pulled the privacy curtain around his cot and lay back, dozing.

He came awake when someone pulled the curtain back just enough to step into the privacy circle around Rodney’s cot, then twitched the curtain back into place.

It wasn’t Evan, though. It was John.

“I get that you’ve been on my team for a long time, but it’s not a contest between you and Ronon for who’s the toughest,” he said. “You got knocked around pretty good before you got hit by that stunner, and you saved Lorne’s team, so that was impressive and very brave, but - your job was to be a scientist, Lorne’s team’s job is to provide security and support. You locking them in the jumper till they agreed to come back to Atlantis was petty and tyrannical and dangerous, and they’re all pretty messed up with guilt. You making it back was luck, not skill.”

Rodney pressed his lips into a thin line. “Everyone has to go above and beyond for this job.”

“I know,” John said, “but you’d be pissy if a botanist tried to do your job, so Lorne is rightly peeved that you tried to do his job.”

Evan was worried about him? That was good, wasn’t it?

“Well, I’m back now, so everything is fine.”

“Yeah, but it almost wasn’t.”

Rodney was startled by the quiet insistence in John’s voice, expecting more anger and yelling from his team leader because he’d gone rogue.

John leaned in and kissed him, soft and slow but burning with intensity, then pulled back just enough for them to breathe, kept his forehead pressed to Rodney’s, their gazes locked. “You really had me going for a while there. But you’re home now. Don’t do that to me again, okay?”

Rodney was wildly confused. Him and John? Since when? “Okay,” he said, a little dazedly, because kissing John was pretty damn nice.

And then the curtain twitched aside and John was standing a respectful distance away in a flash, and Evan was there.

He took in the scene, John breathing hard, his hair even more mussed then usual, Rodney likely blushing. His expression was carefully blank.

“Sir, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

John looked pale, shaky, but his expression was also carefully blank. “It’s fine, Major. I was just having a talk with Rodney about division of labor.”

Evan held up the folded paper with the coaster inside it. “I got your message, Doc, and I understand. Thank you for making things abundantly clear.” Then he nodded at John, the respectful nod most of the soldiers used in lieu of a salute, and ducked away.

Rodney watched him go, confused and hurt, but then John was closing the curtain tightly and perching on the edge of the cot beside him and kissing him again, and obviously there was a lot he didn’t remember.

He hoped it came back, because everything felt hollow and wrong all over again.

*

Being back on Earth after that first year on Atlantis, after surviving the Wraith siege, losing Ford, after the entire expedition nearly dying, was anticlimactic. Rodney went back to his apartment, checked on his cat with his nice, pretty neighbor (her prettiness was irrelevant now, because he had John), enjoyed fresh air and a variety of citrus-free foods. Since they were shipping back to Atlantis on the  _ Daedalus, _ there was a lot more room for personal supplies, so he stocked up on the good coffee and the good chocolate, and he bought a giant external hard drive and loaded it up with movies, TV shows, music, and all the ebooks he could think of.

Like Elizabeth and John and other senior members of the Expedition, he spent most of his time on base being debriefed by SGC and IOA officials. 

John received a promotion. The ceremony was brief but small. It had to have been significant, that General O’Neill gave John his old set of silver oak leaves. Afterwards, Rodney and John had celebrated in the private quarters John had been given on base.

Even though Earth was technically home, Rodney was itching to get back to Atlantis, because Zelenka had been left in charge, and also they were getting an influx of new personal, civilian and military alike, and he needed to break them in.

The night before the next wave of Atlantis personnel were supposed to assemble in the gate room to be beamed aboard the  _ Daedalus, _ John was in some last-minute meeting with General Landry, who was taking over the base from O’Neill after O’Neill transferred to Washington to work for Homeworld Security, so Rodney was at loose ends.

One thing he hadn’t managed was to really have a conversation with Sam Carter, and he wanted to talk to her, apologize for being an ass the first time they’d met, and explain - in the most roundabout terms he could, for John’s safety - that his affections were currently engaged elsewhere, and she didn’t have to worry about romantic overtures for the foreseeable future. So he headed for the labs - and crashed right into some uniformed oaf.

“Hey, watch where you’re going,” Rodney snapped, stepping back.

“Sorry, Doc,” the airman said. He was kneeling down, scrambling to pick up what he’d dropped, which was - tubes of paint.

Rodney sighed, rolled his eyes, and knelt to help him. 

The man had a tiny white plastic box that would fit into a pocket and a much bigger wooden box, into which he was carefully laying his brand new (and now slightly squashed) tubes of oil paints. Rodney studied the label on them.

“Rembrandts,” he said. “Nice. Expensive.”

The airman lifted his head, surprised. “You paint?”

“No, but I knew someone who did,” Rodney said, and then he recognized the man opposite him. Hadn’t seen that face in sixteen years. “Evan?”

Unlike Rodney, Evan had aged well. His hair was short, military regulation. His shoulders were broader, and beneath his t-shirt he was muscular.

“Merry,” Evan said softly. 

“I go by Rodney, these days.”

Realization crossed Evan’s face. “Of course. Dr. Rodney McKay. I should have made the connection.” He finished packing up his paints, closed the wooden box, tucked the other box into his pocket, and stood.

“Made the connection?” Rodney asked.

“I’m shipping out to Atlantis as Colonel Sheppard’s 2IC.”

“His second in command,” Rodney echoed.

“Yeah. Went to the Academy. Started here not long after I graduated. And I have the Gene. You’re looking at Major Evan Lorne.”

“Well - good. Good for you. You always wanted to see the stars.”

“You always wanted to change the world.”

They stood looking at each other for a long moment.

“You’re looking good, for a skinny surfer kid from California,” Rodney said finally.

Evan’s smile was as sweet and sad as Rodney remembered from the last time they saw each other. “And you’re still beautiful, Meredith McKay.” Then he stepped around Rodney and walked away, and for the second time, Rodney let him go.

This was still the best for both of them.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the What If AU Stranded/Lost Challenge (#12). Thanks to Brumeier for her incredible beta work; any remaining mistakes are mine.
> 
> This piece draws heavily on the lyrics to the Joni Mitchell song "A Case Of You" (though I listened to the Rufus Waintwright cover, the KD Lang cover, the Diana Krall cover, and the Ana Moura cover in a loop pretty much the entire time I wrote this), though there is also a snatch of lyrics from the Miike Snow song Genghis Khan in there as well.
> 
> Thanks to Sherlockian Syndromes, who introduced me to the song in the first place.


End file.
